Author: A.T.

From conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan:

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Resign, Mr. President.  It’s truly the best option for you, your party, and the country.

You’re a liar and a conman who preys on the weak and the poor. You’ve made the GOP toxic for an entire generation. . . .

Large swathes of your own base have come to loathe you — and for very good reason. . . .

You are simply incapable of governing in the system of government our Founders set up. You cannot follow the rule of law; you cannot compromise; you cannot negotiate; you actually cannot make a deal.

Every day that passes reinforces your unfitness. . . .  And no one believes or should ever believe a word of what you say. . . .

You’ve destroyed your party, molested the Constitution, turbo-charged the debt, laid waste to our allies, and empowered our enemies. Your legitimacy is over. Your cult is in the Kool-Aid phase. You can spend the next two years in an ever-deepening cycle of political reckoning and disgrace, or you can spare yourself — and us! — the ordeal.

In the immortal words of Oliver Cromwell, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

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(Click here for the full text.)

Have a great week.

THE DIVERSE ELECTORATE

This is a total hoot (60  seconds):  What would have happened if only women had voted in the mid-terms . . . or only white men . . . or only people under 30 — and so forth.  I cant vouch for its accuracy, but it seems to make sense.

THE SCARY STOCK MARKET

“Warren Buffett warned investors about this number 27 years ago,” writes Jonathan Ponciano for the Motley Fool. “It’s never been higher.  Should AI investors worry?“

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  After-tax corporate profits hit 13% of U.S. GDP in the second quarter, the highest in government records going back to 1947 and more than double the level Buffett called a stretch.

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I take two lessons from this piece:

#1 — Yes.  They should.  (James D. Scurlock certainly thinks so.)

#2 — After-tax profits have become too big a share of the Gross Domestic Product.  Things are out of balance.  Corporations may be “people,” but so are the workers who generate those profits — and they are having a heck of a time making ends meet.  The new Democratic Congress needs to offer up a bold New Deal.  Not demonizing corporations and billionaires, most of which and whom deserve a lot of praise. (Hey, they’re just playing by the rules of the game.)  Rewriting those rules to make the game more fair.

THE WORD OF GOD

A friend sent me this sermon by his family’s pastor, Senator-elect Adam Hamilton, delivered nearly 10 years ago (beginning at 16:35), featuring his mom.  It’s pretty great.

The Senate may be a different place come January, with three true followers of Christ in the chamber.  Warnock, Talarico, and Hamilton will be asking their Republican colleagues, many of them professed Christians, to rethink their positions on slashing food assistance to children and the elderly . . . on raising health care costs for the poor while cutting taxes for the rich . . . on deporting and occasionally brutalizing or killing neighbors who are clearly not “the worst of the worst” . . . on adding half a trillion dollars a year to the “Department of War” — and more.  (Worshipping false idols, perhaps?)*

BONUS

*See, for example: Trump a False Idol, Never a Golden Calf and False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump and False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump.

An Aussie friend who lives here texted: “Any idea where I can buy a nice tux?!  I have four weddings in Sydney.”   He needed it before flying down under in a few days.

“Like a nice luxury brand one?”  Except that he has no money.

I went to Cherry Pick, which is still in beta — though quite a bit enhanced since last plugged here — and searched for tuxedos.  I found one that looked good and guessed that the size — 40L — might work.  (He’s taller than I am.)  I forget the name of the brand, but I’d heard of it.  At $450 (new) it was hardly extravagant . . . but “worn four times” it was offered at $50 plus $6.25 shipping.  A couple of clicks later it was on its way.  Today, a week later, a selfie arrived from my Aussie with the caption, “It’s perfect.”

I like perfect.  Saving $400 on a $450 tux isn’t bad either.

I have a bunch of suits I don’t wear (and ties! do you remember ties? I feel so bad for the people who make suits and ties and for my dry cleaner!) — not to mention three tuxes (38R) — and in sorting through them to decide which to give away, I came across, in the pocket of one, notes for a speech I must have given a long time ago.

Included were two quotes that always make me stop and think.

The first is from a letter Abigail Adams, snowbound in Massachusetts, wrote to John off in Philadelphia trying to found our democratic republic.

“Posterity,” she wrote — meaning you and me — “who are to reap the blessings, will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

Every time I’ve come across that quote over the years, I stop to imagine her life — without electricity or hot showers or antibiotics or anything, really — and am reminded how incredibly much we owe our forefathers and mothers, and what a precious, precarious thing is this democracy it’s become ours to steward.  And how much easier we have it than she.

The second quote — I don’t know how it tied into the first or to what audience I was speaking — is attributed to St. Ambrose of Milan (339-397):

“Wealth,” he wrote, “[should be] seen less for its own qualities than for the human misery it stands for.  The large rooms of which you are so proud are in fact your shame.  The poor man cries before your house and you pay no attention.  There is your brother, naked, crying, and you stand there, confused over the choice of an attractive floor covering.”

Every time I’ve come across that one, I think of a friend I asked for $10,000 when I was first starting out as DNC treasurer.  “The whole Supreme Court could be at stake in this election,” I told him.  “I’d love to help,” he said, but he had just put $80,000 on his American Express card for wall coverings for his pool house.  (Not his beach house; the pool house of his beach house.)  So he obviously couldn’t.

Join the Patriotic Millionaires?

And while I’m quoting things, St. Ambrose reminds me somehow of these famous lines from President Eisenhower‘s Cross of Iron speech:

“Every gun that is made,” he said, “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.  It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

Enough with the quotes.

Herewith:

> The headquarters of Antifa (90 seconds).

> Proof many Republicans are uncomfortable with people different from themselves (3 minutes).

> Little Marco has some ‘splaining to do (90 seconds).

> Former President Bill Clinton speaking in 2007 to a future senator (60 seconds).

> Power to the people!!! (45 seconds).

Enjoy.

1. How great was Tuesday?

2. What a message it sent the world.

3. Hurray for Hungary, Serbia, Brazil — and now for America.  Hurray, in short, for democracy.

4. Wall Street didn’t hate it, either.  (Separately, OPRT was up 30% yesterday, but I digress.)

5. Jason Crow did a terrific job recruiting House candidates.  Chuck Schumer did the same for the Senate.

6. Most of our pick-ups were not from the left of our party — candidates who Trump and Putin have somehow persuaded MAGAns are radical lunatics and scum who want to open the borders and close the prisons while imposing communism and sharia law and sending your sons home from school as daughters — all of which, needless to say, is beyond ridiculous.  Rather, most of our flips were from the center.  Oliver Libby, founder of Strong Floor, No Ceiling — “a country that has your back without holding you back” — argues that victorious centrist Democrats will revive the American dream.

7. Chris Gallant’s bid to Make Politics Sexy Again narrowly failed.  But to have come within 2% in a deep red district was impressive.  I’m proud to have supported him.  His 2-minute exit video.

8. Ty Pinkins is Mississippi’s Ralph Nader.*  Only this time, Scott Colom — up by 65 votes as I type this — will emerge the winner despite Pinkins’ syphoning off 19,938 votes that would much more likely have gone to him than to Hyde-Smith.  And Mary Peltola will win also, leaving us at 56-44 in the Senate.

9. We’ve won governorships and flipped state legislative chambers, such that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could conceivably cross the threshold by 2028.  That would effectively abolish the Electoral College, awarding the presidency to the candidate who got the most votes. (What a concept.)

WHAT NOW?

10.  I hope we’ll pass one specific, widely popular bill each week.  The nation can applaud Trump when he signs it or watch to see whether the Republicans will join in over-riding his veto if he does not.  Either way, we should make a big, big deal out of it.

Week One could be restoring aid to Ukraine — and repealing all the price-hikes (aka, tariffs) Trump imposed.  Week Two could be restoring the heath care subsidies he eliminated.  Week Three could be hiking the $7.25 an hour minimum wage.  Week Four could be adequately funding the IRS.  Week Five could be restoring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Week Six could be restoring U.S. AID — and the Voice of America.  Week Seven could be universal background checks and perhaps resurrecting the Assault Weapons Ban (though Malcolm Gladwell makes a great case for hiring a lot more police to prevent crime before it happens, thereby reducing the need for prison beds).  Week Eight could be cutting the ICE budget and re-passing the 2024 bipartisan immigration bill.

And that just brings us to March.  There’s so much to do!  (Ban Congressional stock trading for staffers, too!  Repeal the carried-interest loophole!  Pass the Patriotic Millionaires’ Money Agenda!  Depoliticize the Supreme Court!  Regulate A.I.!)

(And how about inviting Mark Carney to address a joint session of Congress on Week One?  What a message that would send the world?**)

11.  Who knows how Trump would react to any of this.  It’s anyone’s guess what he will be like from here on.  Can he really spend all his time focused on the pipes in the reflecting pool?  His ballroom?  His arch?

His fitness for office, spectacularly dubious from the start, seems even more so now.

Will he quit?  Be asked to step down in some way?  If so, it should probably be Republicans who lead that charge.  Not least because . . .

12. Oversight — not over-reach.  That should be our mantra.  At the same time as we pursue the weekly legislative agenda to make life better for normal Americans, the Congressional oversight committees should be conducting investigations and, where wrongdoing is uncovered, expose it and refer it for prosecution.  Should it be illegal for a private citizen to lie — egregiously — to the FBI?  Hiding government documents in one of your dozens of bathrooms?  One would think so.   Should powerful pedophiles be shielded from exposure?  One would think not.  Is corruption okay just because this Administration says it is?  Why did ICE pay nearly $500 million for a facility that had been offered for $75 million the year before?  Has Pete Hegseth weakened the nation by firing competent people, or preventing their advancement, because they were not straight while males?  These are legitimate areas of inquiry.

14. However, the next few weeks play out before the new Congress is seated and in the weeks and months that follow, there will likely be elections in 2028, 2030, and beyond.  This past year has proved that when citizens become engaged, they can change the course of history.  So, join today’s Indivisible call.

And read or listen to: This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, by Ben Wikler. 

*You will recall that Nader siphoned off 97,488 votes in Florida, which Al Gore “lost” to Bush by 534 — though in fact, if the “overvotes” had been counted, he would have won by 45,000 or so.  But when someone punched Gore’s chad and also wrote in Gore, it was thrown out as an “overvote.”  And so we got the war in Iraq, Roberts and Alito on the Court, and the financial meltdown.) 

**Thanks, Alix, for that idea.

What a night.

Thank goodness.

And thank so many of YOU.

God bless America.

Much more to come.

(Also: did you see OPRT‘s results yesterday?  Or listen to the webcast?  They’re looking to close out 2026 with $1.65 in earnings and have their sights set on a lot of growth ahead.  So if 15x were a fair multiple to accord that $1.65, might OPRT fairly command $25 a share?  Only, of course, with money you can truly afford to lose.)

I have such high hopes.

While we wait . . .

HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?

This Book Explains It All.

It’s called American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark.

I met Roy only once, briefly, at a large gay party late in his life but was instantly repelled.  Yet two of my best friends — wonderful people — loved him. How could this be?! (All three died of AIDS.)  How could he have had everyone from Norman Mailer and Barbara Walters to Cardinal Spellman, William F. Buckley, S.I. Newhouse — mafia dons like Fat Tony Salerno, business titans like Lee Iacocca — and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover all singing his praises?

That would be interesting enough. But the real reason American Scoundrel is a must read is that it explains, in full, exactly who Donald Trump is — and why.

And how someone so truly awful, vulgar, spectacularly dishonest and unethical, reckless and selfish can also be funny, charming, loads of fun — and get away with practically anything.

I could go on and on; but just treat yourself to this amazing romp through American history that Cohn — deeply sad to say — had what turns out to have been an enormus role in shaping.

HOW DO WE GET OUT OF IT?

This Book Explains That.  Or at least a whole heck of a lot of it.

It’s called This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, by Ben Wikler.  I’ve suggested it before and hope it’s on your list.

It’s also a perfect holiday gift for someone — whether young or retired (or just not completely fulfilled at work) — who is casting about for purpose in his or her life.  Or perhaps consumed with purpose, but just not sure how to be effective.

[And by the way?  The goal can’t just be to put things back “the way they wuz.”  The way they wuz is what allowed a demagogue to rise to power.  If you have another 90 seconds, here’s what Oath founder Brian Derrick has to say about that.  It’s going to be an exciting primary season.]

KINKY 3

I guess we’ll find out tonight whether a guy who turned his opponent’s presumed fatal blow into a cheeky campaign slogan — “Make Politics Sexy Again” — can flip NY-1 blue.  For those who’ve been following the race, here’s Chris Gallant’s interview yesterday in Interview.

LEAVING MAGA 4

Or 14 — I’ve surely plugged this spunky little non-profit more than four times.  But I love it, because on a shoestring, it’s caught on nationwide, offering MAGAns a welcoming, non-judgmental, non-partisan (and thus tax-deductible) off-ramp.

Twelve days into their 41-day Kickstarter, they’re 59% to goal.  And it’s one of those campaigns where no credit is charged unless they reach their goal, so I hope they do.  I chipped in.

Seen in Florida:

Hoping for a good night . . .

OSSOFF FOR PRESIDENT?

Well, maybe!  He’d certainly be a strong contender if he ran.  We have lots of exciting talent looking to replace CHAOS / CRUELTY / CORRUPTION with CIVILITY / COMPETENCE / COMPASSION of the type we saw under Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

THE ONION HEADLINE

Mary Peltola Insists Scheme To Put Second Dan Sullivan On Ballot Orchestrated By Mary F. Peltola

Because, I mean, how stupid is this “controversy?”

Leaving aside that the Alaska Supreme Court ruled it’s legal for the decoy Dan Sullivan to run, it’s just the dumbest dirty trick ever.

Alaska has ranked-choice voting.

So Alaskans who aren’t sure which Dan Sullivan is the “real” one (here’s a hint: he is listed on the ballot as “incumbent”) can just vote for both.

Trump (and Carl) pretend to be outraged, pretending to believe that Alaskans who want to reelect Dan Sullivan will be so confused by this that they will only vote for the wrong Dan Sullivan — the one not labeled “incumbent” — or just throw up their hands and vote for neither.

Meanwhile, he’s switched sides in Ukraine (a war Trump 2.0 promised he’d end on Day One) joining Russia and North Korea against NATO . . . gasoline, diesel, and heating oil are through the roof (Trump 2.0 promised to cut energy costs in half within a year) . . . the professionalism and integrity of everything from the Justice Department to the vaccine advisory council have been destroyed (see, also, the BONUS below) . . . he’s got masked ICE agents murdering American citizens . . . he’s spectacularly corrupt (and may have forced a 13-year-old to perform oral sex, as alleged in the partially-released, heavily, redacted  Epstein files).

Yet such is his hold over the minds of millions well-intentioned people like Carl that they focus, instead, on what Carl calls “Decoy Dan.”  And (summarizing the last couple hundred of Carl’s emails) biological men in women’s locker rooms . . . Biden’s alleged use of an autopen . . . Hunter Biden’s laptop (I keep asking: if there was damning stuff on it, why won’t the Trump administration release it?) . . . and, mainly, the threatened communist / sharia law takeover by millions of murderers and rapists Democrats have welcomed, and, if given the power, would continue to welcome, from s—hole countries.

(Carl and MAGA are right that illegal immigration was a problem — swelling to a crisis under Biden — but Democrats have agreed with them all along.  That’s why Democrats fought for bipartisan reform that passed the Senate 68-32 in 2013 but was killed by the Republican House Speaker; and fought an even tougher bill in 2024 that was on the verge of becoming law when Trump killed it, so he could keep it as a campaign issue and keep Carl and MAGA fired up.)

The lies and wild fabrications — all this out of the Roy Cohn playbook, of which more tomorrow or soon — just get more and more preposterous.

Mother Jones‘s David Corn quotes him as saying recently of the Washington he inherited:

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Nobody wanted to eat out. They were afraid. Even if you were in the restaurant, people would walk in and, like the Wild West, hold it up! Everybody is standing there. Can you imagine? A fancy restaurant. They were robbing the whole restaurant. It’s crazy.

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Except none of it was true.  Corn continues in his Our Land newsletter:

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Trump is a serial prevaricator who cannot stop spouting falsehoods. During his first run in the White House, The Washington Post cataloged 30,573 false statements that he emitted. (Nowadays, the Post, following billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ loving embrace of Trump, doesn’t bother to systematically track his deceptions.) But I am highlighting this particular fib because it is so idiotic and so transparently untrue. As a resident of the metropolitan DC area, I can say that folks here were not afraid to go out to dinner prior to Trump’s pointless dispatch of National Guard troops and that “whole” restaurants were not being pillaged by malfeasant marauders.

For Trump, lying is like breathing. It never stops. It occurs automatically, without thinking. Once upon a time, we rebuked politicians if their spin deviated too far from reality. They were afforded much license  . . . but outright lying was considered a step too far.

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“STOP FRAUD”?

Hilarious, writes Heather Cox Richardson.

BONUS

How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine

Vote!

Swipe Blue!

Know Your Rights When Going to the Polls!

Actually, I love Barcelona.  But as a proud New York taxpayer, I was pleased to see Oxford Economics rank us first among 1,000 global cities.   I mean, Nice is nice (#276) and Modesto is modest (#275).  But even Barcelona (#72) was left in our dust.

It’s fun to see how the cities rank, and how Oxford weighs the five factors that go into its calculation.

If you look “overall,” U.S. cities dominate.  If you look just at “quality of life,” Canberra, Australia is first, Bergen, Norway, second, Singapore third — and New York barely makes it into the top 100.

Mayor Mamdani — though a communist Muslim terrorist radical lunatic who wants to toss gays off rooftops, kill all the Jews, and institute sharia law, as some see him — wants to do something about that.

He sent out this blast yesterday:

But first . . .

IF CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, SHOULDN’T THEY HAVE TO PAY TAXES, TOO?

A study of 706 large, profitable U.S. companies that made, between them, $1.88 trillion, showed that 114 of them paid no federal taxes in 2025.  As a whole, they paid a rate of 10.4% — “less than half the official corporate rate, which Trump and congressional Republicans already slashed from 35% to 21% in 2017.”

Americans For Tax Fairness asks that you send a message to Congress demanding repeal of Trump’s tax cuts for large profitable corporations . . . makes it easy to do . . . and then, of course, asks you to chip in if you can.

As it stands now, the rich are getting richer, health care is becoming less affordable, children are losing food assistance, and the deficit is running around $2 trillion — in a year, Trump tells us, the economy is doing great!  So what would it balloon to in a recession?

OPRT / PRKR

First suggested here around $4.30, OPRT touched $10 yesterday.  The hoped-for upward trajectory new management would bring seems to be playing out.  Two or three years from now, those of us who bought it with money we can truly afford to lose, may see it earning $3 or $4 a share and selling at 10 or 12 times those earnings . . . so I’m in no rush to sell even though it’s risen nicely.

PRKR, by contrast, first suggested in the Pleistocene at a buck or so, has fallen catastrophically.  I’m by now inured to the possibility that it will just gradually evaporate, like Lake Poopó.  But its patent infringement claims strike me as so strong (long ago, a jury was persuaded to award $174 million, later all-but-inexplicably vacated by a judge) . . . and the pockets of the defendants so deep . . . that, well, you just never know.  I bought a little more yesterday at 7 cents.

And now . . .

MAKING POLITICS SEXY AGAN

Earlier this month I posted links to Bondage Photos Weren’t Part of the Campaign Plan, from the New York Times, and Why Are So Many Anti-LGBTQ Republicans Interested in Queer Sex?, from Uncloseted Media.

(Did you know that red states record more Google searches for trans porn than blue states?)

Well, yesterday Uncloseted Media dropped this interview with the candidate, Chris Gallant, running to flip NY-1 blue.

Perhaps what one does with consenting adults in the “pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in our founding document, has no bearing on how well one can fly Blackhawk helicopters, control air traffic at JFK, run into burning buildings — all of which Chris has done with distinction — or serve his fellow Long Islanders in Congress.  We may soon see.

Vote!

Swipe Blue!

Know Your Rights When Going to the Polls!

But first . . .

ANDY BOROWITZ

Bolsonaro Accidentally Arrested by ICE Minutes After Arriving from Brazil.

DESPONDEX

Finally (well, new to me) — a cure for my happy gene! 

A LITTLE +GOOD+ NEWS FROM THE WEST BANK

Yes, really!

Barry K.: “Thanks for turning us onto this.  Ten thousand is a big deal in our charitable ‘program’ but Donna and I have decided to sponsor an olive grove.  Besides helping these poor folks, we very much want them to know that American Jews are stepping up — that this ethnic cleansing is passionately opposed by many of us.”

→ Tikkun Olam.

NOT FUN

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Why Is the Media Ignoring the New Rape Allegation Against Trump?

On Monday morning, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a jaw-dropping report about Donald Trump’s longtime ties to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, including a brand new allegation that the president brutally raped a young beauty pageant contestant.

“The bottom line: there is more than sufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation,” the Judiciary Democrats wrote in the report, calling for an independent special counsel to investigate and prosecute the president’s alleged criminal activity alongside Epstein.

Normally, one would think a 53-page congressional report detailing allegations from 11 women tying the president to a pedophile financier’s sex-trafficking operation, with five women directly accusing the commander-in-chief of raping or sexually assaulting them, would lead to round-the-clock coverage by the mainstream and legacy media.

Well, you would be wrong. . . .

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And now . . .

ALASKA

I love Michelle Obama for saying that when they go low, we go high.  Clearly, that was not the case in Alaska’s Senate race . . . though as Trump and Vance demonstrate daily, lying to the press is not illegal.

From the New York Times:

Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot.

There are two reasons to deplore this: the obvious one, that dishonesty is deplorable. And the broader one: that Republicans have so long and so often resorted to dirty tricks and dishonesty . . .

(buried in the piece is a note that Alaska Republicans ran someone of their own against Peltola a couple of years ago who resided in a New York prison)

. . . that some Democrats feel justified in bringing a gun to a gun fight rather than our customary butter knife.

I’ve never favored this myself in part because when Republicans do something sketchy, it’s not news — dog bites, man; but when we do it, it’s so out of character that it does become a big story (as it should) — man bites dog.

Do the ends justify the means?  I think strong arguments can be made on both sides in this case — which is only true because (a) the stakes are so incredibly high (democracy and the entire world order on the line); and because (b) having met Mary Peltola, my sense is that she is a warm and wonderful person, running for all the right reasons — not for the reasons of greed, racism, egomania — or, now, megalomania (not to mention staying out of jail) — that have motivated the leader of the Republican party.

(The best outcome in Alaska Tuesday, needless to say, would be Mary Peltola winning by a wide enough margin to render the whole thing moot from a practical, if not from an ethical, standpoint.)

Vote!

Swipe Blue!

Know Your Rights When Going to the Polls!